Like ghost stories, short tales of mystery and detection were part of the Victorian reader's staple diet. But where the ghost story often cautioned against too great a faith in reason and showed men and women being persecuted by the inexplicable, the detective story celebrated the human ability to explain and comprehend. Edgar Allan Poe's stories concerning the investigations of the brilliant but eccentric Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin form the fountainhead of the detective-story tradition. Thereafter the detective story developed within the framework of mid-Victorian sensation fiction, with its emphasis on crime in contemporary settings and ingeniously devised plots. Then, in 1891, the first series of Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear in the Strand magazine and the detective story was never the same again. In this entertaining anthology Michael Cox has assembled a wide ranging selection of 31 stories from authors such as J.S.

Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Wilkie Collins, Grant Allen, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Fergus Hume, Arthur Morrison, M.P. Shiel, Baroness Orczy, Sax Rohmer, Robert Barr, and - inevitably - Arthur Conan Doyle. There are police detectives, gentleman amateurs, lady detectives (such as Catherine Pirkis's Loveday Brooke), professional consulting detectives, even an 'anti-detective' (Guy Boothby's Klimo, who devises a crime for himself to solve), and a psychic detective. The villains against whom they pit their wits are equally various, as are their crimes - from fraud and forgery to theft, abduction, and of course murder most foul, whether by poison, bullet, or blade. These stories offer hours of enjoyable escape for all lovers of crime fiction.

They also bring alive the Victorian age - its social distinctions, its language and domestic surroundings and, most typically, the sights and sounds of its streets - and together provide an outline of the Victorian detective story from the 1840s to the early years of the twentieth century.